A roundup of notable gifts compiled by the Chronicle:
Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation
Fred Smith gave $65 million to increase the number of scholarships the charity provides to the children of those who served in the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Navy. The scholarships provide financial aid for undergraduates, as well as for students attending career and technical-training programs.
Smith directed half of the gift toward establishing the Brown Hudner Navy Scholarship Foundation, named for two U.S. Navy pilots, Jesse Brown and Tom Hudner. Brown was the Navy’s first Black aviator. He died in 1950 after the aircraft he was piloting was shot down during the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, during the Korean War.
Fighting in the same battle, Hudner crash-landed his own airplane in an effort to reach Brown and pull him from his burning aircraft. The Brown Hudner fund will provide scholarships to Navy members’ children who are studying STEM subjects and health sciences.
Smith founded the FedEx Corporation in 1971 and today serves as the company’s executive chairman. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps in the 1960s, doing two tours of duty in the Vietnam War. His daughters, Molly and Rachel Smith, produced Devotion, a recently released feature film about Brown and Hudner.
Abilene Christian University
Bill and Janie Dukes left more than $29 million to establish the Dr. William P. and Janie B. Dukes Excellence in Finance Endowment. The fund will provide scholarships to students studying finance and establish several endowed faculty positions in finance. University officials plan to create the Dukes School of Finance in the College of Business Administration to honor the donors.
Bill Dukes was a finance professor in the Rawls College of Business at Texas Tech University, where he taught for 45 years. Prior to his academic career, he served in the U.S. Navy and later in the U.S. Marines during World War II. He retired from the Marines as a colonel and was later promoted to the rank of brigadier general.
The couple got to know Abilene through their long friendship with Bill Petty and Jack Griggs, two former deans of the university’s business school. Bill Dukes died in 2015, and Janie Dukes died in June.
Dartmouth College
James and Penny Coulter gave $25 million to support Dartmouth STEM-X, a new effort to increase the representation of historically underrepresented groups in STEM-related advanced-degree programs, policy roles, and industry.
The gift will also be used to establish and endow the Coulter Scholars Program, an academic-enrichment program that seeks to develop the potential and interest in STEM disciplines among undergraduates from underrepresented groups.
Jim Coulter is a co-founder of TPG, a private-equity firm in San Francisco. He is vice chair emeritus of Dartmouth’s Board of Trustees. Penny Coulter is a former interior designer. The Coulters graduated from Dartmouth in 1982.
Cornell University
Andrew and Ann Tisch gave $20 million to create the Tisch Faculty Support program, an effort to foster collaboration between Cornell Tech and Weill Cornell Medicine, and pay for the chair of the new Department of Systems and Computational Biomedicine at Weill Cornell Medicine. The money will also endow a professorship to be held by the chair, as well as endow one senior- and one junior-level professorship at Cornell Tech in the area of health technology.
Andrew Tisch is co-chairman of the board and chairman of the executive committee of Loews Corporation, a New York company with holdings in the insurance, energy, hospitality, and packaging industries. He graduated from Cornell in 1971.
Ann Tisch founded and leads the Student Leadership Network, an organization that operates the Young Women’s Leadership Schools, a network of all-girls public schools, and CollegeBound Initiative, a co-ed college-access program. Earlier in her career, she was a national correspondent for NBC News.
University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus
Katy and Paul Rady gave $20 million to establish the Katy O. and Paul M. Rady Esophageal and Gastric Center of Excellence and advance esophageal and gastric cancer research, clinical trials, screening, surveillance, and treatments. Paul Rady is chief executive and chairman of Antero Resources Corporation, an oil and natural-gas company in Denver.
One of Katy Rady’s brothers, Paul O’Hara II, died of to esophageal cancer in 2015. This is the Radys’ second donation to honor O’Hara. They previously donated money to create the Paul R. O’Hara II Endowed Chair in Esophageal Cancer at the CU Cancer Center.
Jewish Federation of Palm Beach County
William and Tiffany Meyer pledged $8.5 million to support the operations of the newly named William A. Meyer Jewish Community Foundation, the fundraising arm of the federation, and ensure the federation, its partners organizations, and local synagogues have the financial resources to maintain and expand programs and services. Some of the money will support Palm Beach Gardens’ Arthur I. Meyer Jewish Preparatory School and Temple Judea.
William Meyer owns Meyer Jabara Hotels, which operates hotels across the country. He is also a real-estate developer. Tiffany Meyer is executive national vice president of Arbonne International, a multilevel cosmetics-marketing company. She worked as a television news anchor and a model earlier in her career.
To learn about other big donations, see our database of gifts of $1 million or more, which is updated regularly.
